The authors investigated the relationship between cinema and psychopathy to describe and analyze the portrayal of fictional psychopathic characters in popular films and over cinematic history. From 400 films (1915-2010), 126 fictional psychopathic characters (21 female and 105 male) were selected based on the realism and clinical accuracy of their profiles. Movies were then analyzed by senior f...

Recently, a number of authors have suggested that we understand scientific models in the same way as fictional characters, like Sherlock Holmes. The biggest challenge for this approach concerns the ontology of fictional characters. I consider two responses to this challenge, given by Roman Frigg, Ronald Giere and Peter Godfrey-Smith, and argue that neither is successful. I then suggest an alter...

Automatic evaluation of fictional ideation systems and their output is a topic relevant to Computational Creativity. Models and techniques have been proposed for this task, but their applicability is limited to the field of fictional ideation. In this paper we describe an evaluation procedure for fictional ideation, which compares human validation of the ideas with a number of automatically gen...

The invention of fictional ideas (ideation) is often a central process in producing artefacts such as poems, music and paintings in a creative way. Automated fictional ideation should, therefore, be of much interest in the study of Computational Creativity, but only a few approaches have been explored. We describe here the preliminary results of a new method for automated generation and evaluat...

The crisis of representation is a topic widely discussed in critique and theory of postmodern literature. This refers to the crises of the present era including the crisis of meaning, the perplexity of contemporary humankind amidst a mass of valid and invalid data, alienation, etc. Literature, as the epitome of human life, is a reflection of these crises in the contemporary era. Azadeh Khanoom ...

This article examines the issues of media representation and cultural distinctiveness within Scotland, one of many national entities currently denied political and cultural expression at the sub–nation state level. Current output of Scotland’s television and film industries is compared with traditional and modern Scottish literature to see which themes and subjects have been preserved, how repr...

In this paper I argue against the theory – popular among theorists of narrative artworks – that we must posit a fictional narrative agent in every narrative artwork in order to explain our imaginative engagement with such works. I accept that every narrative must have a narrator, but I argue that in some central literary cases the narrator is not a fictional agent, but rather the actual author ...

A considerable part of our lives is spent engaging in the entertaining worlds of fiction that are accessible through media such as books and television. Little is known, however, about how we are able to readily understand that fictional events are distinct from those occurring within our real world. The present functional imaging study explored the brain correlates underlying such abilities by...